Once Again: Bloodbath, “Disappeared” Victims
and Impunity

Mexico: Massacre in IgualaCalls for
Mobilization and Workers Revolution

Students from the teachers college of Ayotzinapa blocked a
caravan of troops on the Autopista del Sol (the highway to the
port and tourist center of Acapulco) on October 5, finally
forcing it to leave. (Photo:
Reuters)

PRI, PAN, PRD:
Murderous Parties of the Bourgeoisie
Forge a Workers Party That Fights For Socialist Revolution!

The following is a translation of a leaflet issued
by the Grupo Internacionalista/México.

In the early afternoon of Saturday, October 4, news
dispatches from Guerrero began reporting the discovery of
several mass graves on the outskirts of Iguala. As the hours
passed, they reported finding first 9, then 20 and finally 28
charred and dismembered bodies in six pits. Many signs
indicate that they may be some of the 43 students arrested by
municipal police a week earlier. If it is confirmed that the
missing Ayotzinapa normalistas were executed, it would be the
worst slaughter of students in Mexico since the fateful 2
October 1968 [when hundreds were killed by army and police in
the Tlatelolco Massacre].

The mass murder in Iguala is already news around the world.
Calls for a “fair investigation” come from human rights
organizations, the United Nations and even the United States
government (which kills dozens daily in its occupation of
Afghanistan and the war in Iraq and Syria). Against this
official hypocrisy, relatives of the dead and missing
Ayotzinapa students along with militant teachers of the
National Coordinating Committee of Education Workers (CNTE)
have marches and nationwide strikes called for today, October
8. There will also be picketing internationally at Mexican
consulates, one of them in New York where our comrades of the
Internationalist Group/U.S. initiated an emergency protest on
Sunday.

In these mobilizations it is critical to hold the Mexican
government and its imperialist masters responsible for the
crime of Iguala. The smokescreen about drug traffickers is
only an attempt to wash the blood-soaked hands of the
government, whereas it is the capitalist state that should be
on trial. There have been up to 100,000 killed and many others
missing in the “war on drugs” under the government of Felipe
Calderón (PAN – the rightist National Action Party) and now
Enrique Peña Nieto (PRI – the long-ruling Institutional
Revolutionary Party), on orders from the U.S. So long as
capitalism persists, there will be bloodbaths,
“disappearances” and impunity. Thus a class mobilization of
working people against the bloodthirsty state of the bosses is
urgently necessary, crippling key sectors of the economy and
pointing toward socialist revolution.

Why?

Mexican president Peña Nieto sent in the National Gendarmerie
(in black uniform, left), a new unit of the National Police,
to patrol the city of Iguala together with army troops (olive
green uniform, right), the same army responsible for the
massacre in Tlatlaya at the end of May. (Above) Guarding city
hall, October 6. (Photo:
AP)

The murder of six people in the night and early morning hours
of September 26-27 was only the prelude to the carnage. There
are pictures of the missing students being transported in
vehicles of the municipal police to the outskirts of the city.
The official government version of Guerrero governor Ángel
Aguirre Rivero (PRD – the supposedly “progressive” bourgeois
Party of the Democratic Revolution), is that a kingpin of the
drug cartel Guerreros Unidos (United Warriors), a certain
“Chucky,” ordered the chief of police to apprehend Iguala
students to deliver them to his henchmen, who then executed
them. But whatever the role of the drug traffickers in the
kidnapping and disappearance of the teachers college students,
it should be underlined that the bourgeois state apparatus
is directly responsible for what happened.

Why did this heinous crime occur? Initial versions accused
the students of having “stolen” some buses to take them home,
although it had been negotiated with the drivers. Then it was
claimed that the mayor of Iguala, José Luis Abarca Velázquez
(also of the PRD), who has been “untraceable” since last week,
considered it an unpardonable offense that the students had
been collecting contributions in Iguala on the day his wife
offered a “gala” event after reading her report as head of the
local DIF (the government system for Integral Development of
the Family). With his connections to drug trafficking and as a
financier for Governor Aguirre, the fugitive mayor
thought himself untouchable: last year he reportedly killed
with his own hands three leaders of the peasant organization
Emiliano Zapata People's Union, with total impunity. Even
today, there are still no charges against the mayor for the
massacre of September 26-27, according to the federal attorney
general’s office (the PGR).

However, the responsibility does not lie solely with the
murderous PRD mayor. The PRD governor began his term with the
murder by the state (and federal) police of two students from
the Ayotzinapa teachers college on the Autopista del Sol (the
superhighway to Acapulco). He only had to apologize some time
later. The same Aguirre Rivero was head of the state PRI
organization in Guerrero in 1995 when the PRI government of
Ruben Figuera Jr. massacred 17 peasants in Aguas Blancas.
There were never any judicial consequences. Today many
demonstrators demand the resignation of Aguirre, but the head
of the national PRD, Carlos Navarrete, is opposed, because in
that case one would have to oust several state governors. (The
mayor of Iguala belonged to same tendency of the PRD – Los
Chuchos– as Navarrete.)

Now the PRI president Enrique Peña Nieto has sent in the
newly established National Gendarmerie (the body of the
Federal Police which he announced with great fanfare at the
beginning of his term) to patrol Iguala, along with the army.
This is the same army whose members are responsible for the
slaughter in Tlatlaya (in Mexico state) in late May, where it
executed over a dozen “perps.” But the people of Guerrero have
not welcomed the troops, which only promise more repression.
Last Sunday (October 5), hundreds of supporters of the
Federation of Socialist Peasant Students of Mexico (FECSM),
which includes Ayotzinapa and all the rural teacher training
institutes in the country, blocked a military convoy on the
superhighway and forced it to turn back.

Whatever the immediate cause that triggered the bloodbath of
Iguala, the rationale for the slaughter is the demonization
of militant students and the commitment of the
governments of all the parties to close the rural teacher
training institutes. This is part of the privatization
offensive against public education ordered by Washington
and the global financial institutions. Today, this calamitous
policy is being carried out in Mexico by Peña Nieto and his
education secretary, Emilio Chuayffet, who was interior
minister at the time of the massacre at Acteal in 1997. It
should be noted that a lawsuit in the United States against
former President Ernesto Zedillo for Acteal was recently
rejected because the former president enjoyed “immunity.”

Rural teacher training institutes have been favorite targets
of education “reformers,” who label them “nests of communists”
or “Bolshevik kindergartens,” as was pointed out by the
researcher Tanalís Padilla (La Jornada, 4 October).
Their students have been persecuted and brutally suppressed
for opposing the constant attempts to economically strangle or
close their schools. Elba Esther Gordillo herself, the former
“Secretary General for life” of the corporatist National Union
of Education Workers (SNTE), an agency for police control of
teachers, called for eliminating rural teacher training
schools. At a seminar on “new education” this
government-imposed “labor leader” who is responsible for
hundreds of killings of teachers, said:

“We have raised many times that if the authorities
close some of the rural teacher training institutes, there
will be a lot of rioting by the youth. Don’t forget that these
schools were seedbeds for guerrillas. But if we don’t do this,
the same thing will keep on happening. “

From Rebellious Guerrero to Workers
Revolution

Demonstrators outside the Mexican Consulate in New York
denounce the “government of murder” over the massacre in
Iguala, at emergency protest initiated by the Internationalsit
Group/U.S., October 5. (Internationalist
photo)

Guerrero has long been the scene of militant mobilizations of
“those at the bottom”1, and a vicious cycle
of massacres, dirty war and repression by the “those at the
top” – the capitalist ruling class. In the rugged Sierra Madre
del Sur, isolated villages live as in previous generations
from seasonal crops, which are often insufficient for
subsistence. Indigenous communities of Nahua, Amuzgo, Mixtec
and Tlapanec Indians scattered around in the Montaña region,
along with major concentrations of Afro-Mexicans in the Costa
Chica, have experienced centuries-old ethnic and linguistic
oppression that continues to exist today. In recent years they
have also been stalked by illegal loggers and murderous drug
gangs.

“Guerrero ready to fight!” goes a popular chant in
demonstrations in Mexico City. Indeed it is, and has been
since the time of the guerrillas led by Genaro Vázquez Rojas
(in the 1960s) and Lucio Cabañas (early ’70s), both graduates
of Ayotzinapa. (Cabañas was also president of the FECSM.) Then
came the insurgent peasants among the copra (coconut) and
coffee growing regions, and the militant mobilizations by
CETEG teachers (the local affiliate of the CNTE) and their
allies in the teacher colleges. Last year, the CETEG started
off the largest and longest teacher struggle in decades,
although it was not backed up in time by other sections of the
CNTE. However, each of these struggles has remained isolated
from the power that actually has the ability to defeat the
bloodthirsty capitalists: that of the urban working class.

The state has a remarkable revolutionary history, beginning
with Vicente Guerrero, military commander in the war of
independence from Mexico, born in Tixtla where the Ayotzinapa
teacher institute is located, who became the first and only
black president of Mexico (his parents were Afro-Mexican and
indigenous) and carried out ​​the abolition of slavery.
Unfortunately, Vicente Guerrero also supported the Plan de
Iguala which trumpeted the “union” of social classes and
subordinated his insurgent army to the royal army of the
future “emperor” Agustin de Iturbide. From then up to the
installation of governments of the PRD made up of former PRI
pols, class collaboration has undermined the rebelliousness of
Guerrero. As in Salvador Allende’s Chile, “the people united”
is a slogan for defeat. Our call is to Fight, Win, Workers
to Power!

Today, it is evident that calling for “clean” investigations
and demanding the resignation of a mayor, a governor or even
the President of the Republic will not solve anything. The
lament and anger of relatives and compañeros of the missing
students, who angrily demand on their banners that “they were
taken alive, we want them back alive,” will keep on being
repeated. The weak Mexican bourgeoisie, subject to imperialism
and confronting a powerful proletariat and poor peasantry,
cannot do without bloody repression to maintain its rule. As
noted by the great Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, founder
of the Red Army and the Fourth International, in the
imperialist epoch, in semi-colonial countries like Mexico a
workers and peasants government is required to resolve the
democratic tasks, initiating the international socialist
revolution.

There are those who dream of taking to the hills and
starting up the armed struggle as in the past. But as in the
past, heroic gestures will not achieve victory, because
peasants do not have the economic and social power and
consistent class interest to overthrow capitalism. We have
pointed out that the current “self-defense groups” of the
Tierra Caliente of Michoacán are run by the employers, and the
indigenous community police of Guerrero are controlled by
Aguirre’s government. At the same time, we continue to demand
freedom for Nestora Salgado and the community patrol members
arrested for carrying arms. From the Zapatista uprising in
1994 to the teachers and popular uprising of Oaxaca in 2006,
the lesson of recent years ‍– and of three failed
bourgeois-democratic revolutions – is that the next Mexican
revolution will be a workers revolution, or it will not be.

It is necessary to break with the PRI, PAN and PRD,
capitalist parties whose hands are stained with blood, and
also with Morena, the movement of Andrés Manuel López Obrador,
one of whose agents in Guerrero, the current state secretary
of public health, Lázaro Mázon, is the main political
godfather of José Luis Abarca, the murderous mayor of Iguala.
We need to build a revolutionary leadership armed with the
Trotskyist program of permanent revolution, to build the core
of a Leninist workers party like the Bolsheviks in Russia,
serving as tribune of the people by leading all the exploited
and oppressed to the taking of power.

We send our message of proletarian solidarity from Mexico
City (and Berlin and New York) to the battle-hardened teachers
college students of Guerrero, to their comrades and parents:
“We are with you, now and forever!” And let the governments of
the day of the bourgeoisie know, both in Mexico and the United
States and around the world, that their crimes will not escape
the vigilance of the world working class. For the 2014
slaughter of Iguala like that of Mexico City on 2 October
1968, there will be no forgetting, no pardon ... Fight,
win workers to power! ■

1.Los
de abajo, a reference to the novel of that name by
Mariano Azuela, written in 1915 at the time of the Mexican
Revolution and translated into English as The
Underdogs.